Esther Frumkin

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Esther Frumkin
עסטער פרומקין
Frumkin in 1926
Born	Khaye Malkhe Lifshitz 1880 Minsk, Minsk Governorate, Russian Empire (now Belarus)
Died	(1943-06-08)8 June 1943 (aged 62–63) Karlag, Kazakh SSR, Soviet Union (now Kazakhstan)

Esther Frumkin^[a] (Yiddish: עסטער פרומקין; 1880 – 8 June 1943), born Malkhe Khaye Lifshitz^[b] and also known as Mariya Yakovlevna Frumkina^[c], was a Belarusian Bundist revolutionary and publicist and Soviet politician who was a prominent leader of the General Jewish Labour Bund in Lithuania, Poland and Russia, and later of the Yevsektsiya in the Soviet Union. An ardent proponent of the Yiddish language, her political position on Jewish assimilation satisfied neither traditional Jews nor the Soviet leaders.

Khaye Malke Lifshitz was born in 1880 in the city of Minsk, then part of the Russian Empire.^[1]

Her grandfather was a Hasidic rabbi and scholar, while her father, Meyer Yankev Lifshitz, was educated in secular and Jewish studies and wrote poetry and prose. Her mother, Basya, came from the Katzenellenbogen and Romm families of Vilna.^[2]

Esther was educated at home until the age of 11, studying Hebrew, the Talmud, and texts associated with both the maskilim and Zionist movements of her time.^[3] She then attended the gymnasium in Minsk, and went on to study philology and Russian literature at the Pedagogical University in Saint Petersburg.^[1] There she came into contact with revolutionary circles, and became familiar with Marxist theory.^[1]

Frumkin was active in Social Democratic circles in Minsk from 1896 and joined the Bund in 1901.^[4] The Bund, in which Frumkin became a prominent leader, was an antizionist movement.^[5] She subsequently edited Bundist periodicals and wrote extensively on Jewish education.^[6][7] She stressed the need to impart elementary education in Yiddish in secular schools for the children of Jewish workers.^[8] In 1910, she published Tsu der Frage vegn der Yidisher Folkshul (On the Question of the Jewish Public School), which advocated secular elementary education in Yiddish for Jewish working-class children.^[9][10]

Frumkin was arrested by the tsarist police in September 1907 and released shortly afterward. In 1908, she went into exile in Austria and Switzerland. She was arrested again in late 1912 and banished to Siberia. She escaped and spent most of World War I in hiding.^[8]

Following the February Revolution of 1917, Frumkin returned to Minsk and was elected to the Bund Central Committee and was one of the editors of Der veker.^[8]

Frumkin frequently appeared on stage giving speeches and became an active Bundist propagandist.^[11]

When the Kombund dissolved in March 1921, Frumkin joined the Russian Communist Party and declared, “Bundism will continue to exist as long as there is a Jewish proletariat.”^[8]

In the 1920s, while living in Moscow, she was a member of the editorial collective of the Yevsektsiya's Yiddish newspaper Der Emes (The Truth), where she wrote primarily on cultural and educational issues.^[12] While continuing to promote Yiddish culture, Frumkin played a central role in the Yevsektsiya's campaign against Jewish religious organizations in the early 1920s, which resulted in the forced dissolution of rabbinical institutions.^[13] These campaigns formed part of the Yevsektsiya's broader drive against organized Jewish life; the Jewish sections' first conference in 1918 had resolved on the "systematic destruction" of Zionist and religious institutions, and the Yevsektsiya subsequently carried out the closure of the kehilla, Hebrew-language schools, and yeshivas and the suppression of Zionist parties.^[14] Frumkin's Russian-language antireligious pamphlet Doloy ravvinov! (Down with the Rabbis!, 1923) was distributed in hundreds of thousands of copies and drew sharp criticism from contemporary Jewish observers in the West.^{[15]: 15, 28–29} Several memoirists nevertheless recalled instances in which Frumkin intervened on behalf of those targeted, including helping to secure the release of the Maggid of Minsk from prison, extending students' exemptions from labour drives to yeshiva students, and voting to return a house of study that the Yevsektsiya had seized in Vitebsk.^{[15]: 28–29}

In 1922, Frumkin was appointed vice rector of the Communist University of the National Minorities of the West (KUNMZ) in Moscow.^[11] She became rector in 1925.^[11] She taught an advanced seminar on Leninism.^[8] She wrote the Yiddish-language work Lenin, zayn Lebn un zayn Lere (Lenin, His Life and His Teachings) and, with Moyshe Litvakov, edited an eight-volume Yiddish edition of Lenin's writings.^[11]

In 1936, KUNMZ was closed and Frumkin was transferred to the Institute of Foreign Languages. She was expelled from the institute the following year and subsequently arrested. After several years in prison, she was sentenced in August 1940 to eight years in a forced-labor camp for political prisoners in Kazakhstan.^[8] She died there on 8 June 1943. The Soviet Union rehabilitated her in 1956.^[8]

In 2018, Suzanne Sarah Faigan completed an annotated bibliography of 357 of Frumkin's publications as her PhD thesis. Faigan categorized the material as including translations, memoirs, didactic party journalism, theoretical and poetic works, and material for young readers. She characterized Frumkin's writing as variously moralistic, humorous, derisive, and emotive, while describing it as consistently clear and assertive and often possessing a personal quality. Faigan noted that the bibliography was representative rather than exhaustive.^[15]

Among Eastern European Jews, Hebrew traditionally served as a language of study, writing, prayer, and communal records, while Yiddish was the principal vernacular and was also used in popular literature and casual writing. From the 1880s, some Zionists promoted the revival of Hebrew as a multipurpose national language and regarded Yiddish as "uncouth" or "parochial".^[16]

In 1908, Frumkin attended the Czernowitz Language Conference, where she opposed Y. L. Peretz's proposal to create a worldwide Jewish cultural organization and argued that Yiddish should be declared the only Jewish national language. The conference rejected that position and instead adopted a resolution declaring Yiddish "a national language of the Jewish people".^[17] In the years that followed, educators such as Dveyre Kupershteyn and Sofia Gurevitsh established elementary and secondary schools with instruction in Yiddish.^[18]

Despite having championed Yiddish, Frumkin is a controversial figure in Jewish history. In A Price below Rubies: Jewish Women as Rebels and Radicals, Naomi Shepherd writes that "no woman was more admired or more hated by Jews under the first phase of Soviet rule; no woman in Eastern Europe achieved such stature in Jewish politics."^[19] In fall 2019, the Workmen's Circle offered an online course on Jewish radicals that included Frumkin.^[20] Yet she has been associated with antisemitism by writers as divergent as the far-right figure Frank L. Britton, whose The Hoax of Soviet “Anti-Semitism”: Jews, Zionism, Communism, Israel and the Soviet Union 1918–1991 (Ostara Publications) includes Frumkin's "Address on 'National Minorities' to the Second Congress of the Communist International" (1920), and Dara Horn, whose essay "The Cool Kids: Self-mutilation as a Jewish cultural strategy and the sad history of the Yevsektsiya" appears in Tablet: A New Read on Jewish Life.^[21]

• Appel, Tamer Kaplan (27 February 2009). "Esther Frumkin". Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia. Jewish Women's Archive. jwa.org
• de Haan, Francisca; Loutfi, Anna, eds. (2006). Biographical Dictionary of Women's Movements and Feminisms: Central, Eastern, and South Eastern Europe, 19th and 20th Centuries. Central European University Press. pp. 140–143.
• "Esther: Radical Leader". Yiddishkayt.org. Accessed 7 October 2019.
• Faigan, Suzanne Sarah (2018). An Annotated Bibliography of Maria Yakovlevna Frumkina (Esther). Ph.D. diss. Australian National University, 2018. iv, 4. Accessed 9 October 2019.
• Gechtman, Roni (25 August 2010). "Lifshits, Khaye Malke". YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe.
• Horn, Dara (6 September 2019). "The Cool Kids: Self-mutilation as a Jewish cultural strategy and the sad history of the Yevsektsiya". Tablet.
• Katz, Dovid (2004). Lithuanian Jewish Culture. Vilnius, Lithuania: Baltos Lankos. pp. 227, 309, 316. ISBN 9955-584-41-6.
• Shepherd, Naomi (1993). A Price below Rubies: Jewish Women as Rebels and Radicals. Harvard University Press. p. 139.